About This Class

In this 90-minute class, frog Executive Creative Director Jason Severs reveals how to think creatively and purposefully about how we organize, arrange, and improve everything around us.

Covering research, ideation, storytelling, and strategy, Jason shares tactics for designing new experiences. To help you put everything in practice, you'll be challenged with a special class project: redesigning the grocery store and creating "before" and "after" journey maps that communicate your strategy.

This class is perfect for designers, professionals, and everyone interested in social change. Get ready to revolutionize the way you think and unlock the potential of every experience.

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What You'll Learn

Trailer. You’ll meet Jason Severs in this graphic design course as he encourages you to get into the mode of design thinking and translate that to design action.

Introduction. You’ll begin to think about how designers organize, arrange, and systemize things in our world, hinging on the experience of going through a grocery store. Jason will introduce the idea of the “journey map,” and you’ll get acquainted with his core design principles: conversation, empathy, and positivity.

Core idea: Discovery. Following the notion that everything in the world has been designed for you, you’ll conduct a thought experiment about the space you inhabit and learn the distinction between the impact and consequences of a design.

Research: Big ideas and tactics for interviews. You’ll learn how to begin your research by approaching everyday problems from a fresh slate and making acute observations about the processes at work around you. In addition to taking online graphic design courses, it’s important for you to conduct interviews with people in context of the problems you’re trying to fix. Here, you’ll learn how to conduct a shop-along and intercept interviews to get to the heart of your design challenge.

Research: Observations. You’ll learn an effective framework for approaching the observation phase of your design process. Jason will remind you that observing doesn’t necessarily meaning standing on the sidelines.

Synthesize: Organizing insights. Now that you have your data, you’ll learn how to turn it into insights. Jason will introduce a litmus test for whether your insight is any good, suggesting tools to use when externalizing your thought process and introducing you to the affinity map, which will help you visualize data.

Class project: The journey map. You’ll discover how to turn a customer experience journey into a visual map that includes both observations and ideas. You’ll compare a simple journey map to a more complex one, and learn how to combine your insights with the map to create an experience story.

Ideation: Questions and random entry. Jason will introduce you to design games like the random entry technique, by which you’ll generate random words to help inspire your next big idea. You’ll see how seemingly irrelevant words and objects can inform your design decisions and learn how to embrace new technologies without leaving behind important elements of passé practices.

Ideation: Design and emotion. As Jason encourages you to capture your thinking in notes, photographs, and sketches, you’ll learn the importance of combining form, function, and users’ emotions. You’ll also learn how to make your designs tangible, and when it’s time to start sharing your work with others.

Storytelling: Communicating for resonance. You’ll take the idea of storyboarding a film to craft a tale around the product or experience you’re redesigning. Whether it’s video game designing or rewriting the grocery store script, you’ll find that the best way to communicate your ideas to other people is by turning them into a story. Jason will teach you two possible storytelling devices with which to do this — the hero’s journey and factual explanation.

Jason Severs has been at frog for over nine years and is the creative lead for the New York studio. He is a global leader for frog's Experience Strategy practice, which he helped to establish as core services among frog's diverse process and portfolio. He also is a lead other practices such as creative facilitation, information design, and data visualization. Jason brings all the skills to bear as a creative lead and is responsible for promoting a holistic perspective for his design teams to ...